Professional Hard Drive and Flash Data Recovery Services

Quantum LD30A011 Data Recovery Information

These are some real problems experienced by LD30A011 and Quantum hard drives in general that we see in our lab. We are not affiliated in any way with hard drive manufacturers. All the information below is based solely on our experience and we do not make any claims regarding reliability of the specific model. We see mostly failed drives in our lab and therefore we don't have complete statistics.

I'm sad to say the external hard drive was accidentally dropped off of an end table about one and a half feet high. Now when I try to connect it to my computer I can start to hear it spin, then it quietly clicks about 4 or 5 times, then stops spinning completely. The green power ring stays lit until I unplug it from the power supply, I can't turn it off by pressing the big front button. The computer won't recognize anything is plugged in, and I don't think the BIOS shows it either.
J-P.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Most common problem for Quantum drives is bad sectors. After some period of time magnetic media that covers the platters starts to degrade and magnetic domains can't be turned in a desired direction by writing element of the head. This is how bad sectors appear.When the drive starts reading data from such unreadable bad sector it could start freezing, scratching and sometimes even clicking: . This leads to further damage to the heads and surface, and may result in further data loss. As soon as you start experiencing such symptoms stop the drive immediately and send it to our data recovery lab for evaluation. Any further attempts would just add up to the problems. In our lab we use special imaging hardware tools that are capable of reading raw sector data ignoring checksum check. That's usually the only way to get as much data as possible from these LBAs.

Another quite common symptom Quantum drives have is clicking or knocking sound. The drive usually spins up, clicks a few times, spins faster, clicks again and spins down: . Most often this a sign of a bad head, but before doing any clean room work, it is very important to perform accurate diagnostics and eliminate a chance of possible firmware corruption that sometimes could also cause clicking.

The drive doesn't spin up (probably burnt logic board). The drive originally came as an external USB drive. I believe I must have mistakenly plugged the wrong power adapter, and must have first burnt the USB to IDE board, as the drive wasn't recognized by the PC but was still spinning. But after having tried unsuccesfully several times, the drive stop spinning altogether. I also tried using another USB to IDE board. Their was no spinning, although the PC understood a HD drive was attached (but couldn't access any volume).
J.K.M.
Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Quantum hard drives are also well-known for their firmware problems. If one of the firmware modules becomes corrupted, the drive fails to initialize correctly and stops working making the data inaccessible. In such case the drive is either

not found in BIOS at all

shows up with wrong S/N or capacity,

or fail to read any data or boot up operating system.

If you attempt to boot up from such drive or read any data from it you would get "Primary Master Hard Disk Fail" or "No operating system found" or "USB Device malfunctioned" error or something similar.

If you experience any of the symptoms described above with your Quantum LD30A011 please feel free to contact us to get upfront quote on data recovery from your failed drive.

If you hear your Quantum hard drive making some other unusual noises visit our Hard Drive Sounds page for more examples.

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